Sotomayor's Unfortunate Dissent
Apr. 26, 2014
By Linda Chavez
Justice Sonia Sotomayor this week took the unusual step of reading her dissent in a case involving state-sponsored affirmative action in Michigan. In doing so, she showed herself not only petulant to be on the losing side in a 6-2 decision, but unable to divorce her legal reasoning from her own sense of racial grievance. It was an embarrassing but predictable performance.
In 2009, I was one of a handful of witnesses who testified against Sotomayor’s confirmation before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I did so with sadness, because there is much to admire in Sotomayor’s personal history.
Raised by a single mom after her alcoholic father’s death when she was 9, Sotomayor overcame poverty and poor health (she had juvenile diabetes) to graduate summa cum laude from Princeton University and excel at Yale Law School. But rather than ascribe her own success to hard work … she attributes virtually all her accomplishments to affirmative action. How sad. …
Sotomayor’s dissent is peppered with highly selective research purporting to show the damage done to blacks and Hispanics when states pass bans on racial preferences. She includes charts showing a decline in admission to the University of Michigan after the passage of the ban on racial preferences, as well as declines in admissions to UCLA after a similar ban passed in California. But she dismisses evidence that despite the drop in admissions at the flagship schools in California, for example, overall enrollment of black and Hispanic students at other University of California campuses has gone up after voters banned preferences. More importantly, students admitted to schools whose admission standards they could meet without racial preferences were far more likely to graduate.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Schuette doesn’t resolve the contentious issue of affirmative action, but it does uphold the right of the people to decide the issue directly rather than relying on university bureaucrats.
Sotomayor said during her confirmation hearings that a statement she had made earlier that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” was simply “a rhetorical flourish that fell flat.” Unfortunately, her dissent in Shchuette suggests she has failed to learn that lesson.
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